Abstract

There are a few popular business excellence models that provide standard criteria against which an organization can measure its performances. European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) is the most popular one. The organizational self-assessment process is an admissible system in the area of Total Quality Management (TQM). Most specialists concur to the description of self-assessment that is presented by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM). However, the current self-assessment methods in EFQM model have some drawbacks and problems which are scoring in these methods influenced by experts’ judgment and thus, are subjective. Furthermore, these methods cannot consider the empirical investigation and expert knowledge in scoring and also they cannot convert uncertain and imprecise data (linguistic variables) to crisp data. Since Artificial Intelligence models such as Fuzzy Logic can solve the uncertainties and complexity in assessment system, a new assessment system for EFQM evaluation will be designed using fuzzy logic. The proposed assessment system can provide an effective and precise scoring, simultaneously considering knowledge and experience of experts and assessors. The results showed that the new comprehensive developed model is more valid and acceptable and the experts verified the model for assessing based on EFQM in practice. The developed model was used in a case study and results drawn out from it were evaluated from distinctive viewpoints.

Key words: European quality award, European Foundation for Quality Management, business excellence model, area for improvement, fuzzy logic, assessment system, self-assessment.